The NICHD
Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development began with
children born at 10 U.S. hospitals. During infancy, the children
were assessed with observations of mother-child interactions,
interviews with mothers, and rating forms completed by mothers.
For children who received nonmaternal child care, the quality
of the care was assessed by observers who rated caregiver-child
interactions in the primary childcare arrangements at ages
6, 15, 24, 36, and 54 months. Although previous studies have
reported associations between childcare quality and behavioral/emotional
problems among children in general, Pluess and Belsky (2009)
tested the hypothesis that childcare quality might have much
bigger effects on children with difficult temperaments than
on children who did not display the negative emotionality
characterizing difficult temperaments. Ns ranged from
761 to 915 for various measures. Among children classified
as having difficult temperaments (i.e., being high on negative
emotionality), it was found that those receiving low quality
childcare had significantly higher Total Problems scores on
ASEBA Caregiver-Teacher Report Forms (C-TRFs) completed by
caregivers at 54 months than children receiving high quality
care. The same was true for teachers' ASEBA ratings when the
children were in kindergarten. By contrast, no significant
associations were found between teachers' ASEBA ratings and
childcare quality for children who were low in negative emotionality.
In other words, there was a strong interaction between the
effects of difficult temperament and the quality of childcare
on ASEBA problem scores, such that children who were high
on negative emotionality were strongly affected by the quality
of childcare, whereas the quality of childcare did not affect
ASEBA problem scores obtained by children who were low on
negative emotionality. In fact, children who were high on
negative emotionality but received good childcare actually
had lower ASEBA problem scores than children who were
low on negative emotionality, whether they received good or
poor child care. The authors therefore concluded "it
is not just that negatively-emotional infants are more at
risk of succumbing to the adverse effects of problematic rearing
environments, but that they also reap a greater benefit from
supportive family and childcare environments" (p. 401).